preprints, email, blogs...as more conducive to research

Charles Henry states:

Recent work also suggests that the scholarly article, especially in science, is less and less relevant to the progress of research and the evolution of our knowledge. The article is more of a token, or totem, of promotion and tenure with less intellectual value or influence than commonly believed.

The traditional models of scholarly communication appear increasingly less efficacious. In their place, the rise of less formal, more conversational methods of communication—preprints, email, blogs, Web postings—appear to be more influential and conducive to research advancement and community building.

This excerpt is from an article titled Can Universities Dream of Electric Sheepskin?: Systemic Transformations in Higher Education Organizational Models in the Journal of Electronic Publishing, v. 11(1), 2008, accessed February 10, 2008: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0011.101 .

I found the statement above fascinating as this blog contains a record of my research process, a working out or through of the questions that arose, the issues I tackled, and the relevant or interesting tidbits not directly related to my research question but an outcome nonetheless of this process. As such this blog is an accompaniment to the outcomes we call articles, and is to me intrinsically more interesting than the articles themselves. The article describes a single outcome or product of research, the blog describes multiple by-products of that same research and reflects the process. And the blog is more reflective and representative of the joy (and angst) of discovery than the article will ever be.

Also of interest is the question this generates: how do librarians "collect" these new containers for information?